Translating PISA into the Hungarian policy discourse

Hungary is one of the European countries whose education system has repeatedly been diagnosed as showing below average performance with above-average variance between schools, when compared with other countries participating in the OECD’s PISA survey. This article explores how this diagnosis was received by domestic actors and discusses the main characteristics and arguments of the national public debates invoked by PISA. The national PISA discourse is analyzed by looking at how the problem definitions proposed by international constructs about the necessity to strengthen ties between schooling, labor market demands and economic competitiveness eventually resulted in reframing the national policy solutions, after a process of translation and recontextualization.